Spotlight: Event support

An event has been a proven PR-instrument for years. Events come in many shapes and sizes, and when we say ‘many’, we mean 'many’! October is traditionally a busy event month, but journalists also have a wide choice of corporate events at the beginning of the year.

It is therefore fair to conclude that an event is an efficient way to engage directly with your clients, potential prospective clients and relevant media. As regards the latter group: it is important to offer journalists a good reason to attend your event. This might be the presentation of new products or services, the presence and availability of execs for interviews or the presence of clients who are happy to share their experiences with media.

Besides offering an interesting substantive programme, there are many ways to insert an event in a PR campaign. We offer you some tips and tricks, based on the event that we co-organized for our client Synology last year.

Video report

Make sure there is a video recording of the event. You can share this video with participants later on, but you can also use on your own (social) channels to show all that took place on that day. If the event recurs annually, you can use the video to attract visitors to the next edition.

You can reach the same effect with a nice photo report, which makes it worthwhile to hire a photographer to record the entire day.

Initiate collaborations

Of course organizing an event that is interesting enough for journalists to attend is key, but do try to look beyond this goal. For the Synology event, for instance, we initiated a collaboration with a publisher of tech magazines. Some of their readers were given the opportunity to be among the first to be briefed on new devices by Synology engineers during the event. They then received a NAS device to try out at home, and their experiences were published in an article that appeared in several magazines.

Discern between press and public events

Finally, make a distinction between the press and the public part of the event. During the Synology event, the morning programme was exclusively for invited media. As a result, there was ample time for the Synology spokespersons to answer questions more in-depth and in a one-to-one setting. The public part took place in the afternoon, and interested journalists of course had the option to attend that part of the event as well.